IT201800007908A1 - CONVEYOR TROLLEY - Google Patents

Description

CONVEYOR TROLLEY

DESCRIPTION

The present invention relates to a transport trolley, particularly, although not exclusively, useful for the transport and handling of motor vehicle tires inside medium and large workshops.

The problem of the transport of goods is deeply felt in various industrial and / or commercial sectors. In fact, since the dawn of industrial civilization, it has been necessary to transport the goods produced from the production site to the various stages of its distribution. Initially, this was done on foot or by carts, mostly pulled by animals, such as horses, donkeys, mules or sometimes oxen. With the invention of the steam engine and the train by Stephenson in England in 1825, goods were transported over longer distances by land. By sea, goods have been transported by ships since ancient times (think of the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, Etruscans and Romans). In many cases, the ability to transport goods, especially by ship, made the fortune of entire nations, as the cases of the Italian maritime republics (Amalfi, Genoa, Pisa and Venice) or Great Britain demonstrate.

With the advent of the internal combustion engine, the transport of goods by land acquired new tools, such as trucks and lorries, more versatile and elastic than trains, since they do not need rails and which allow to reach directly the places of consumption of products.

The possibility of a rapid and efficient transport of goods was among the causes - although not the only one and, in truth, not even the most important - of the impressive industrial development that took place above all from the 18th century onwards. This has led to the need for faster production processes, which requires the ability to stock products awaiting shipment or distribution. In this way, large storage sites (such as sheds and warehouses) have been built, in which goods are deposited. It is important that the storage inside these structures is as orderly as possible, in order to avoid the waste of space, which is often expensive or difficult to expand.

The need to have tidy warehouses has created the problem of correct handling of goods within them. In fact, often the weight of the objects to be arranged in an orderly manner is too high to be able to move them by hand, or they are very bulky goods or with shapes that, in any case, make it difficult for workers to move them by hand. Furthermore, the vertical development of storage structures allows to reduce soil consumption, a problem that is gradually increasing these days and that involves, in addition to ecological-social problems, also very high costs for the purchase of land. , increasingly rare and therefore increasingly expensive.

For all this, various types of conveyor trolleys have been created. There are so-called forklifts, forklifts and others. These trolleys generally comprise sections: a guide section, from which the operator performs all the necessary maneuvers, loading sections, driving sections, lifting sections, overturning sections and so on; Please note that it is not necessary that all these sections be present on a trolley, but it is possible that there are several of them, combined and coordinated in an appropriate way.

Among the various commercial sectors, the tire sector has developed considerably since the advent of the automobile until today. In particular, in recent years so-called winter tires have been developed, which give their best performance for low temperatures, typically from 7 ° C down. These winter tires allow you to drive on snow and ice with a level of safety very close to what normal tires get on normal terrain. For this reason and for the convenience of not requiring the installation of snow chains, the so-called winter tires have become increasingly important over time. However, winter tires have the defect of causing wear that is faster and higher than that which normal tires undergo. For this reason, it is normally used to fit normal tires in the hot season and winter tires in the cold season; typically, normal tires are used from May to October and winter tires from November to April. Such a regime allows you to travel safely at all times, while minimizing tire wear. Obviously, tires are removed from one car on a certain date and re-fitted in another.

The problem is that the tires that are removed, being still usable, must somehow be stored. Since not everyone has a space in their own home, there are many garages that provide a service to keep tires that you are not using. These workshops foresee warehouses, these too, like those mentioned above, developed extensively in a vertical sense. This makes it necessary to hoist and lower tires to place them on shelves at a certain height or to pull them down from them.

Tire handling operations are mostly carried out with special transport trolleys. A trolley of this type is made with a driving part, to which a driving platform is connected, where the operator is located and to which a loading tray is connected, consisting of a fork, movable along guides. The forks insert the tires on the ground, then the guides are placed horizontally and the transport of the tires from one part of the warehouse to the other takes place with the tray lying horizontally for transporting the tires. Once at the shelf where the tires are to be placed, the driving platform is raised until it reaches the desired height and the tires can be manually unloaded from the tray. Similarly, when you want to retrieve tires from a shelf, you go to the right height with the platform, load the tray manually, bring the platform back to ground level, move the trolley to the unloading position, fold over. the tray and lower it until the fork is brought to the ground and the tires are placed on the ground.

However, this construction presents some problems. First, the movement of the tires, for balance reasons, must be performed with the tray horizontal. A movement with the tray vertically would have the main drawback of risking to fork other objects along the way, in particular through eyelets, straps and ropes, and to cause the tires to fall off the tray during transport. In any case, even with the horizontal tray, this construction hardly prevents one or more of the tires carried from sliding out of the tray laterally, ending up on the ground, often rolling, thanks to their shape, inside the warehouse, thus creating confusion. Finally, the manual loading-unloading of the tray with tires is difficult. The drawback of the horizontal arrangement of the tray, however, is that the vehicle takes up too much space during transport, which requires relatively large maneuvering spaces to avoid problems; such spaces are not always present in modern car repair shops, so it becomes difficult even to make more than one truck work at a time.

The problem underlying the invention is to propose a transport trolley structure which overcomes the aforementioned drawbacks and which allows the transport of tires or other similar objects, minimizing the bulk and the risk of loss of the load, allowing the loading and manual download of content. This purpose is achieved through a transport trolley, comprising a drive unit and a platform for the operator, said platform being able to move perpendicular to the plane of movement of the drive unit, therefore vertically, and carrying a pair of guides for a loading fork, characterized in that the two tines of said fork are joined together by a closing crosspiece. The subordinate claims describe preferential features of the invention.

Further characteristics and advantages of the invention are however better evident from the following detailed description of a preferred embodiment, given purely by way of non-limiting example and illustrated in the attached drawings, in which:

fig. 1 is a schematic plan view of a trolley according to the present invention;

fig. 2 is a side schematic view of the trolley according to the present invention;

fig. 3 is a schematic front view of the trolley according to the present invention;

fig. 4 is a schematic perspective view of a trolley according to the present invention;

fig. 5 is an overall view of the driving platform and the loading surface of a trolley according to the present invention; And

fig. 6 is a plan view of a loading surface of the trolley according to the present invention.

The transport trolley according to the present invention comprises a drive unit 1, carried by wheels 2. In the case illustrated in the drawings, the wheels 2 are two pairs, but any number of them is suitable, the choice being made according to the specific needs of the shape of execution that you prefer to implement. The wheels 2 can be all or partly driving and / or steering, according to the needs. Unit 1 carries a hood 3, which contains the motors necessary for the movement of the unit itself.

A platform 4 for an operator 5 rests on the hood 3. The controls for all possible movements of the trolley according to the invention are placed on the platform 4 at a height chosen according to the best ergonomic criteria. In this way, the operator 5 has greater ease of maneuvering, thus optimizing his work.

In the part of the hood 3 that is free from the platform 4 there is a pair of load guides 6. Preferably, the load guides 6 are fixed in a known way to the body of the platform 4; in the illustrated examples, this fixing takes place by means of crosspieces 7. Said guides 6 can preferably be moved between two positions, one horizontal and one substantially vertical, with a slight inclination.

The guides 6 end in their lower part with a fork 8. The fork 8 is able to slide along the guides 6, so as to have the load always within reach of the operator 5.

Examining fig. 6, it can be seen how the fork 8 comprises two prongs 9, 10. According to the present invention, the two prongs 9, 10 are joined together by a crosspiece 11, which causes the space between the two prongs 9, 10 to be closed on all sides.

The operation of the trolley according to the present invention will be illustrated in the exemplary case of the loading of tires 12, but it will be the same whatever the chosen load.

When it is desired to use the transport trolley according to the present invention, the operator 5 climbs, in a per se known manner, onto the appropriate platform 4. The platform is made in such a way as to allow a practical, effective, simple and complete maneuver of all the functions of the conveyor trolley according to the present invention and responds to all the most modern safety requirements connected to trolleys of this type. Thus, for example, the platform 4 is generally surrounded by a sort of parapet and access is allowed by a sort of gate, the leaves of which oppose a certain resistance, so as to prevent accidental opening and to withstand some possible impacts. by the operator 5 during maneuvers and travel; in this way, an accidental fall of the operator 5 from the platform 4 during operations is made very difficult, in particular when the platform 4 is raised with respect to the hood 3. Advantageously, the operator 5 will have at his disposal, in a compact and easy way to use, all the commands for all the operations that the transport trolley can perform, without requiring it to move from a certain driving position, wasting time and risking confusion.

First of all, the operation of loading a shelf in a workshop is described.

The tires 12 are placed on a floor of the workshop. The operator 5, thanks to the controls placed on the platform 4, moves the transport trolley, thanks to its own motorization which drives the wheels 2 forwards or backwards; the operator 5 also has steering controls for the wheels 2, so that the transport trolley can reach practically every normally accessible point of the workshop. The guides 6 are, during the transfer, kept in an almost vertical position, so as to have an easier movement and to have less difficulty in maneuvering, with less risk of inadvertently hitting some protrusion present in the workshop. Arrived in proximity of the place where the tires 12 are deposited, the operator stops the running of the trolley, in order to have easy access to the tires 12 themselves, activates the guides 6, so as to arrange them horizontally, brings the fork 8 into position close to the platform 4 and loads the first tire 12 on it and on the guides 6, placing its lateral surface in the space between the guides 6. At this point, it moves the fork 8 towards the distal end of the guides 6, by an equal distance at the height of the loaded tire 12, then manually loads the second tire 12 on the guides 6, resting its base at that moment lower than the base at that moment higher than the one already loaded, then proceeds to move the fork 8 again towards the distal end of the guides 6 by a distance equal to the height of the tire 12 just loaded. The operations proceed until all four tires 12 of a train are arranged on the guides 6. At this point, the operator 5 returns the guides 6 to an almost vertical position. In reality, there is still a residual inclination of the guides 6 towards the platform 4, so as to further reduce the risk of accidental falling of the tires 12 from the guides 6 and to maintain the balance of the transport trolley during subsequent operations.

At this point, the operator 5 acts again on the motorization and steering controls and brings the transport trolley near the shelf which must contain the tires for storage. Once there, the trolley travel will be stopped again and the operator 5 will act on the controls to raise the platform 4 with respect to the hood 3 of the transport trolley, in a per se known manner, until reaching a height suitable for placing the shelf. of destination within reach of the operator 5, so as to be able to have him unload the tires 12 manually.

Lifting the platform 4 automatically also raises the guides 6 with their fork 8, thanks to the presence of the crosspieces 7. Once in position, the guides 6 will again be brought into a horizontal position. At this point, the operator 5 grabs the nearest tire 12 with his hands and places it on the target shelf, in the most suitable position for its storage. Once this is done, the operator acts on the fork 8, so as to bring it closer to him, until the second closest tire reaches the position where the first was previously, stops the translational movement of the fork 8 and grabs the second tire 12 , to place it in its destination. Subsequently, he moves the fork 8 again towards the platform 4, so as to bring the third tire 12 to the position where the first and second were previously, repeating the same operations for the third and then for the fourth tire 12, up to empty the guides 6 from their contents. At this point, he can put the guides 6 back in an almost vertical position (again, with the usual minimum residual inclination), he can bring the platform 4 back into contact with the hood 3 and bring the transport trolley back to the position of parking, or you can go to retrieve another train, repeating the same operations just seen. Eventually and in case of need, the operator 5 can move the transport trolley with motorization and steering, so as to return to a position where the shelf where to deposit the tires 12 is again within reach even while the platform 4 is raised. compared to hood 3; it is also conceivable to definitely change the shelf, if the one where the first 12 tires were deposited is now full.

The operations for removing the tires 12 from the storage shelf and bringing them into the working position are now described.

Starting from a position that can be defined as parking (parking should be understood in the widest possible sense, also including positions where the transport trolley has been abandoned by mistake), the operator 5 climbs onto the platform 4 in a completely similar way to what has been described. previously and maneuvers the transport trolley towards the shelf where it is to carry out the picking, acting on the motorization and steering. Once in position, it stops the movement of the trolley and raises the platform 4 with the guides 6 up to a height such as to have the tires 12 within reach. The operator 5 brings the guides 6 to a horizontal position, bringing the fork 8 to a distance from itself such as to leave free between the guides 6 and the platform 4 a space close to (preferably equal to or slightly greater) at the height of one of the tires 12 to load. With his hands he grabs a tire 12 from the storage shelf and places it with the lateral surface on the guides 12 and with the base away from him on the fork 8. Once this has been deposited, he moves the fork 8 away from him by an equal distance at the height of the tire 12 which has just been loaded, it grasps a second tire and rests a base thereof on the base present towards it of the one already deposited; it again moves the fork 8 away by a distance equal to the height of the tire 12 just deposited and repeats the operations just described, until all the tires of the train have been picked up.

It is advantageous if a minimum inclination with respect to the horizontal is maintained, so as to exploit the force of gravity to always keep the tires in contact with each other and with the fork 8.

If, as is very likely, after one or two tires, the next one is no longer within reach of the operator 5, he can move the transport trolley with the motor and possibly the steering, to have greater comfort and safety in the recovery of the other tires.

Once the loading is completed, the operator 5 returns the guides 6 to an almost vertical position, brings the platform 4 back into contact with the hood 3 and moves the transport trolley, so as to approach the work area. Once here, he returns the guides 6 to a horizontal position and begins to unload the first tire 12 on the floor, in the working position. The operator 5 then approaches the fork 8, so as to bring the second tire 12 close to him, stops the movement of the fork 8, unloads the second tire 12 and repeats this operating sequence until the guides 12 are completely unloaded.

Once these operations have been completed and the guides 6 have been emptied, the operator 5 returns the guides 6 to an almost vertical position and returns the transport trolley to a parking position or resumes operations. As stated, this substantially vertical position provides for a slight inclination; preferably, said slight inclination is oriented with the fork 8 away from the bonnet 3 of the trolley.

Preferably, the position of the guides 6, while being able to reach an almost complete verticality - desirable in itself - is never perfectly vertical, thus avoiding the accidental fall of tires 12 deposited on them, thanks to the action of gravity and movement.

The "closing" of the tines 9 and 10 of the fork 8 by means of the crosspiece 11 has two fundamental advantages: it avoids the possible fall of the tires 12 during travel and loading and it avoids, unless it is used intentionally incorrectly, of entangling the transport trolley in objects and protrusions present in the operation area; these advantages are realized in an extremely simple and elegant way, without having to resort to complex tools, but having an efficacy that is completely unexpected. The compactness obtained from the verticality achievable thanks to the "closing" of the fork 8, according to the teaching of the present invention, is also an advantage, far from predictable, with respect to the carriages of the prior art.

The operation of the trolley according to the present invention has been described in relation to the handling of tires, but it is clear that the same principles can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the handling of goods of any kind, without requiring a particular expertise from the operator 5.

However, it is understood that the invention must not be considered limited to the particular arrangement illustrated above, which constitutes only an exemplary embodiment thereof, but that various variants are possible, all within the reach of a person skilled in the art, without thereby departing from the scope of the invention itself, as defined by the following claims.

LIST OF REFERENCE CHARACTERS

1 Drive unit

2 Wheels

3 Bonnet (of 1)

4 Platform

5 Operator

6 Loading guides

7 Crossbar

8 Loading fork

9 Rebbio (of 8)

10 Rebbio (of 8)

11 Cross (of 8)

12 Tires

Claims (6)

CLAIMS 1) Transport trolley, comprising a drive unit (1) and a platform (4) for the operator (5), said platform (4) being able to move perpendicularly to the plane of movement of the drive unit (1), therefore vertically, and carrying a pair of guides (6) for a loading fork (8), characterized in that the two tines (9; 10) of said fork (8) are joined together by a crossbar (11) of closure. 2) Conveyor trolley as in 1), characterized by that the controls for all possible movements of the trolley are placed on the platform (4) at a height chosen according to the best ergonomic criteria. 3) Transport trolley as in claim 2), characterized by the fact that the operator (5) also has wheel steering controls (2). 4) Transport trolley as in any one of the preceding claims, characterized in that said guides (6) can be moved between two positions, one horizontal and one substantially vertical, with a slight inclination. 5) Transport trolley as in claim 4), characterized in that said slight inclination is oriented with the fork (8) far from the hood (3) of the trolley. 6) Trolley as in any one of the preceding claims, characterized in that the fork (8) is able to slide along the guides (6).